Professor Cobb currently teaches Africana Studies at Brown University in Rhode Island. Every once in a while, this book will remind you that Cobb’s politics are very markedly to the left, except on the issue of gun control. I suspect that more than a few of Cobb’s associates will be either scratching their heads or filled with fury.

Cobb’s book is both a history of the civil rights movement and a memoir of his involvement. Cobb was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the front-line civil rights organizations in the 1960s South. As the name suggests, SNCC -- like many of the civil rights organizations -- eventually adopted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s belief in peaceful non-resistance. But as Cobb’s book explains, even Dr. King was not initially prepared to turn the other cheek.

Sympathizers described Dr. King’s house in the 1950s as an arsenal. Dr. King was not unique: as Cobb’s book explains, idealistic young men and women like himself with college educations and often from Northern cities could adopt the idea of non-violence at least in part because the Southern blacks that they had come to help were under no illusions of how well this idea of non-violence would work.

Many of these realistic Southern blacks were not young. Cobb recounts the story of an 80-year-old woman who had finally, because of the voter registration drives, been allowed to vote. She walked up to Stokely Carmichael, one of the civil rights organizers, outside a polling place, “and produced this enormous, rusty Civil War-looking old pistol. ‘Best you hol’ this for me, son. I’ma go cast my vote now” (p. 3).

Many of the Southern blacks prepared to use guns in self-defense against the Klan were veterans of World War II and the Korean War, where they had learned self-confidence in combat and that being armed was part of what made you a citizen.

In other cases, the willingness to fight back involved less abstract concepts than voting. Cobb describes Lou Ella Townsend, a Mississippi cotton farmer who regularly carried a Luger pistol with him in the fields. One day, a white man on horseback saw Townsend’s teenaged niece in the field, and told her “that he intended the take the girl back home, and also that he was going to beat her niece so she would know her place.” Townsend made it clear that doing so would be his last action on Earth. “Of twenty-two brothers and sisters in [Townsend’s] family, she and two others were the only children who were not the product of rape by white men” (p. 94).

Cobb describes how the increasing use of federal law against lynchings in the 1950s played a part in restraining the most outrageous forms of anti-black violence, but the relatively relaxed gun control laws of the South and the widespread culture of gun ownership played a part as well. “Nighttime marauders had learned to keep a more respectful distance from their targets because the targets were increasingly prone to shoot back.” The return of so many combat-experienced black soldiers from the two wars meant that terrorizing blacks was no longer a risk-free activity (pp. 123-4). Indeed, it could and sometimes did get Klansmen killed.

https://pjmedia.com/blog/guns-and-civil-rights/

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'This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed:' Guns and the Civil Rights Movement